In Baltimore, William H. Hudnut III is known for one thing - he was the mayor of Indianapolis who took the Colts.
But elsewhere, Hudnut is widely respected as a visionary thinker on urban issues.
Indeed, though Maryland's retiring state comptroller would probably not like the comparison, it could be said the Hudnut is the William Donald Schaefer of Indianapolis.
Schaefer, of course, was the Baltimore mayor who not only developed Harborplace and conducted the Inner Harbor Renaissance, but lost the Colts to Hudnut's Indianapolis. Reportedly, he holds a grudge.
Hudnut has been a Maryland resident for a decade, working for the Washington-based Urban Land Institute, where he is the Joseph C. Canizaro senior resident fellow for public policy.
It's not the first time Hudnut has lived in the state. A Princeton graduate who went on to Union Theological Seminary in New York, Hudnut was minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Annapolis from 1960 to 1963.
"I used to come up to Baltimore to watch the Orioles at Memorial Stadium," he says.
Later, during his one term in Congress in 1971-1973, he played on that field in a pregame match between Republican and Democratic congressional teams.
Hudnut was mayor of Indianapolis from 1976 to 1991. After that, he worked for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis and the Civic Federation of Chicago before arriving in Chevy Chase in 1996.
Hudnut says it was his theological training that got him into public service.
"My father used to have this saying that some Christians were so heavenly minded that they were no earthly good," he said last week, before the Colts and Ravens faced off in the playoff game. "I always felt that part of the whole of biblical ethics, in both the Old and New Testaments, was to be involved in the affairs of a community, to do something by way of giving back to a community."
Hudnut says that's the reason he served six years on the town council of Chevy Chase, including two as mayor.
"I thought I should give something back to the state of Maryland, since I had taken something away," he says. Do you see the parallels between Baltimore and Indianapolis, other than the fact both absconded with other cities' NFL teams?
I think a lot of cities east of the Mississippi were all facing problems of urban disinvestment and abandonment. All of them were dealing with this in whatever way they can. It's a line that goes from Chicago and Gary, Ind., to Cleveland, down to Pittsburgh and across the country to Baltimore, to Philadelphia on up the East Coast, perhaps even across the ocean to some cities in England.
There are parallels between Indianapolis and Baltimore. We built a stadium for football which was tied into our convention center. Maryland built you a couple of stadiums. Both of us were trying to use sports to leverage economic development opportunities.
I tend to feel that economic opportunity is the most important thing we can emphasize in the struggle to alleviate poverty. It's a very difficult transformation to the information-based economy from the one based on the big steel mills that have shut down. In Indianapolis, we had a lot of automobile manufacturing that closed. In 1983, I think it was, Indianapolis was told by AT&T; that they were going to close their Western Electric factory where all the Princess telephones were made. That was 1.8 million square feet. 8,700 jobs. We scrambled around and finally found somebody else to occupy the building, but that is hard on a city to lose 8,700 jobs.
I think we also have similar lingering problems. How shall I put it? We both have neighborhoods in need of repair. Joel Kotkin [author of The City: A Global History] has called Baltimore a Potemkin city, meaning the revival is just a facade. I'm not sure I agree with that.
I was up in Baltimore in April, giving a speech on historic preservation, and I saw that theater, the Hippodrome, that is the centerpiece of that west side area's redevelopment. We did that in Indianapolis, rehabbed a theater downtown and made it the home of the Indianapolis Symphony.
So there are similar ways in which we are tying to trigger downtown investment and reinvestment. If cities like Indianapolis and Baltimore lost their manufacturing, haven't they lost one of their main reasons for existence, to gather together a labor force to work in those factories? And doesn't that mean they have to find a new reason to exist?
Storm Cunningham, who wrote The Restoration Economy, says that this will be the "re-century," the century of things like reinvention, redevelopment, reinvestment. In building, restoring and renewal are going to be as important as new construction. Housing rehabilitation is an area where I think there is going to be quite a bit more activity as the century unfolds, as the younger generation comes along and wants smaller housing, not the McMansions of the baby boomers. The emphasis will be on downtown reinvestment.
Our public policy during my 16 years as mayor of Indianapolis was to encourage downtown reinvestment without discouraging suburban investment. The job of a mayor of a place like Indianapolis and Baltimore is to attract growth and hold the line against deterioration. That's different from the mayor of Phoenix or some other mayors down south, in Florida, where the job is manage growth.
One thing that makes the job easier is if you have, as Baltimore does, a great university, in Johns Hopkins, and medical centers, Hopkins and the University of Maryland. Indianapolis is similarly blessed, with Butler, Indiana University, Purdue University and the University of Indianapolis. Health care and education are going to supply an awful lot of jobs to those well enough educated to hold those jobs. That's the transition from the brawn economy to the brain economy, another parallel with Indianapolis. But isn't one danger that the city gets left with the low-paying jobs, the service jobs, the workers who serve the needs of the higher-paying people coming in from the suburbs? Isn't this a danger of turning cities into entertainment Meccas, with stadiums and aquariums and the like?
The first time I ever heard of the Urban Land Institute, where I now work, was in the mid-1980s when it published an article on leveraging amenity infrastructure. That means taking an amenity like sports and using it to enhance economic development. It's not the money that the sports games themselves bring in so much that the games, plus a lot of other events held in the stadium, give rise to downtown businesses like restaurants and hotels.
It's been said that if you create one new hotel room, you create two jobs, one inside the hotel and one outside. Economists say that you can't prove that the presence of a major league team enhances the tax base. That is probably true, but that does not quantify the intangibles, how it can lift the sprit of the city, or other economic spin-offs.
When we filled that AT&T; plant that emptied out, it was a couple of years later with a distribution center. The guy who did that was from Rochester, N.Y. I asked him why he chose Indianapolis to make such a substantial investment. He said it was because he read about it in the sports pages.
As for whether these are the best jobs, well, having a job is better than not having a job. This may be someone setting foot on the bottom rung of the economic ladder and climbing up. Maybe it is a second income for some. Maybe they will become entrepreneurs. The fact is that these jobs are created and that service is going to be a much larger part of the job base than any other for the foreseeable future. Are you optimistic about the future of cities?
I think you have to be. Cities are resilient. They go through cycles of deterioration and rebirth. Cities are the cradles of our cultures. They are the exchanges where finance and telecommunications come together. They obviously have their weaknesses as places where, too often, poverty is concentrated. But I don't think cities are going to disappear. Most Americans prefer living in the burbs, but as I used to say in Indianapolis, you can't be a suburb of nothing. Does William Donald Schaefer talk to you?
Let's just say our paths don't cross. But I admire him. When I was president of the National League of Cities in 1981, I was asked who the best mayors in America were and I mentioned Schaefer and Ed Koch in New York. I admired the way he tried to improve the responsiveness of the bureaucracy, how he was legendary for driving around town and calling in complaints that needed dealing with.
He would always pop up with an optimistic face, with the exception of the day the Colts left. I just thought he was a very good mayor, devoted to his city. I would still say that, even though he doesn't care for me too much.
michael.hill@baltsun.com